Mat has gone through the trouble of filling up a spreadsheet with the cost breakdown of Seeed’s PCB service. It seems that the boards with the lowest cost-to-area ratio are the 10cmx10cm ones that are ordered in quantities of 10. For higher quantities it quickly becomes apparent that the larger boards have a lower cost-to-area ratio.

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22 Responses to “Cost breakdown of Seeed’s PCB service”

Seems odd to me to see such non-linearity in the pricing, although thinking about it..I guess the market demands will actually sway the pricing away from linear expectations. (ie 10×10 @ 10 pcs). They must be moving a high volume of those orders in order to get that price outlier.

Having had the same 5×5 board done at both Seeed and Itead, I couldn’t spot any significant difference other than iTead’s silkscreen was sharper than Seeed’s which was a tad fuzzy. (Of course iTead also includes 100% factory e-test for no extra charge which is why I decided to try them.)

My guess is that this is not what’s going on. It was my understanding that Seeed/Itead’s gotten this great price by usng their orders to fill in incomplete panels that the PCB manufacturer is already running, and therefore utilized a resource that would otherwise be wasted. I will concede though that this doesn’t explain the (super) sweet spot for 10x10cm boards that doesn’t carry over to the other sizes.

There’s always Design Spark which I believe is coming along. I don’t think it’s open source, but it’s free and I don’t think it has the restrictions of Eagle from memory. (Considering the liveliness of the Eagle Vs. Open Source debate, I know suggesting Design Spark is going to create a lot of ‘Sparks’).

10×10 from Seeed costs $24.90 and the cheapest shipping becomes around $7
So, I just order two 10×10 from Seeed and add a cheap connector/anything to cart to make it cross $50 and free shipping. Isn’t that nice?